


Jade and Jake: Explore this Human Emotion Called Gender

by deliverusfromsburb



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Family Bonding, Gen, I think I tagged platonic relationships correctly, Jade tries to google gender, TLC compliant, i don't know how to use this website, it goes about as well as you'd expect, nonbinary Jake, not that you can tell beyond a few throwaway lines, postgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 09:54:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8619856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: Jake considers updating his wardrobe and maybe his gender identity. It happens to us all.





	

**Author's Note:**

> As someone who is currently sheltering from the harsh gender elements under the nonbinary umbrella, I figured if I was less than thrilled by HS's nb rep I'd better take matters into my own hands.

The cinematic masterpiece SBAHJ: The Movvvovie 8.35 has an hour of runtime left when you spot Jake peering around the doorframe. You get to your feet, or try to, since you’re wedged tightly between the other members of your session. On one side of you, John keeps laughing at what you think are the wrong times. On your other side, Rose is taking notes.

Your social circles have widened, which is usually a relief but sometimes overwhelming, driving you back to smaller groups like sessionmates, family members, or traveling companions to watch movies or do something else low-maintenance. The whole group then invariably tries to shove themselves onto a piece of furniture not up to the task. The sofa you’re piled on now, which might fit three on a good day, is showing the strain. Rose has to jab John a few times in the leg before he gives you a shove to the small of your back to help you up.

“Apologies if I’m interrupting, Grandm- Jade,” Jake says when you join him. “I could come back later.”

It’s ten minutes past when you were supposed to meet. How long was he lurking outside, reluctant to let you know you were running late? “Don’t worry about it," you say. "It’s not really my sense of humor. Besides, I promised to help you.”

He starts walking after a pause, as if he’s expecting you to reconsider and dash back inside. Hopefully one day he’ll believe he’s not a burden on your time. “I could try on my own, but Roxy was threatening to declare me a code one if I didn’t talk to anyone today.”

You peer into one of the rooms where you’ve stashed alchemizing equipment. “Gloomy and antisocial for over 48 hours?” The number system has mostly escaped you, although you almost got flagged with a four when you overslept. Roxy has taken monitoring everyone’s health to heart with her typical enthusiasm.

“She means well, but it might be going overboard.”

The room is unoccupied, so you beckon for Jake to join you. The ritual of wandering around the house until you find space that’s free is a habit by now. “She’s not wrong about worrying when people don’t talk. We all need alone time, but there’s too much of a good thing. I am afraid it’s encouraging competition, though.”

“I don’t think Dirk meant it about going for a high score, but it can be difficult to determine his sincerity sometimes.” He ejects a bunch of cards from his sylladex, fanning out the flat representations of clothes over the table for your inspection. Ever since he changed out of his God Tier outfit, Jake has insisted on wearing pants that reach to his ankles, if not past them. He must be sweltering in the early summer heat, so you offered to help alchemize something more comfortable. You don’t have Kanaya or Calliope’s skill at tailoring, but you’re used to making alterations to clothing airdropped based on orders made by a grandfather who’d had to guess what your sizes would become. Besides, dressing to stay cool while keeping your skin safe from sunburn, bug bites, and bracken has been a defining factor in your fashion sense. If anyone can keep him modest without heatstroke, it’s you.

“Do you have anything in mind?” you ask, pulling out your sketchpad. Once you have some ideas, if it isn’t a combination easily created by the items before you, you can try your pictionary modus again, as long as it doesn’t insist on making everything Johnny 5. Hal has already accumulated a collection, and you don’t think he needs more soldiers for his robot uprising, even if he’s joking.

He picks up a captcha card of a pair of athletic shorts and skims it across the table. “It’s hard to manage this heat. That’s part of why I kept my shorts so short in the first place. That and the hopes of thigh holsters, which aren’t nearly as convenient as the movies make them out to be.”

“Hollywood does that a lot. Don’t even get me started on their science.” You kick your feet, which poke out from the long skirt you’re wearing today. “But covering up and staying cool don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”

“Is that comfortable?”

“It’s good for air circulation! Do you want to try one?”

It’s harder to spot a blush on dreamers from your moon, but you see his cheeks darken. “Boys don’t wear skirts.”

“Says who?”

“Says everyone. Don’t they?”

Now it’s your turn to shrug. “No one was around to say anything for me. Maybe I didn’t see it on tv, but there’s no rule against it. Jane wears pants most of the time.”

“Well, yes. But it usually doesn’t go the other way.”

“Why not?”

He throws his hands up in the air. “I don’t know. It’s one of those silly rules about being a boy. There are lots of them. Rules and regulations and ways you have to behave, or else! If I could choose, I’m not sure I’d choose to be one.”

“Me neither.” You think back to how John and Dave used to act, the conversations that struck you as unkind but they insisted were how boys talked to each other. They don’t do that anymore, so it looks like there are other options after all. The idea that there were set rules in the first place had always seemed absurd. A lot of the trappings of the modern world had, but you’d chalked them up as more things a child raised by a dog and the voice she’d given her dead grandfather could never understand.

“I’m not sure I’d choose to be a girl either. No offense,” Jake hastens to say. “They have just as many strictures. Even more, I expect! Calliope said she decided to be a girl, did you know that? Wait, I’m muddling this up.” Now you can definitely see the blush. He interlaces his fingers and flexes them, a nervous gesture that makes your fingers twitch in sympathy. “How did she explain it…? She didn’t know what being a girl was for a while, but when she did she… knew that was what she was? Oh, I’m not explaining this right.”

“You’re doing fine.” You drop your sketchpad onto the table, thoughtful. “It makes sense that cherubs wouldn’t think about those kinds of things the same way. They grow up alone, right?”

“More or less.”

“More or less,” you repeat with a laugh.

“I suppose it wouldn’t come up, not without seeing other people like she did.” After a moment, he adds, “You grew up alone. How did you decide?”

“That I was a girl? Wellllll…” You stretch out the word, waiting for an answer to occur to you, but one doesn’t arise. “I don’t know that I did. Maybe I assumed. I like dresses and pretty things, and the Prospitians called me a princess.”

“And that makes you a girl?” Jake’s brow furrows as he tries to follow your attempts to decipher something you’ve always taken for granted. You like a lot of the trappings, but some sort of essence of girliness eludes you, along with the point of finding one. You can count the electrons in a single atom, but this isn’t concrete. Space deals with things that are. Abstraction, when it comes to serious matters, only causes you frustration. It’s never occurred to you to ponder this, but to Jake it seems to matter a great deal.

Suspicion as to the nature of his interest blossoms within you like the temple lotus flower delivering its timelocked treasures at exactly the moment they’re needed. You snap your fingers, and your laptop drops onto your knees in a flash of green light. "We should look this up!”

Research is a familiar strategy. Your friends talked about a life so different from your own you might as well have lived on different planets. You’d look up how public school worked and imagine yourself there (without much success), and in conversations with Dave you’d often have Wikipedia open and ready to check the biographies of celebrities. Understanding gender is a bit more complicated than identifying Chuck Norris, but the principle should be sound.

Turns out it’s a lot more complicated. There are lots of terms you don’t recognize, lots of disagreement and discussion. Your research is like everything else about your new life – full of color and chaos and contradiction. On a wiki for marginalized identities, you find a list that looks more straightforward than most and start working your way down it.

“That’s a mouthful,” Jake says, pointing at one.

“It helps to break the words down into small pieces.” No one had been around to tell you how an eight year old girl should talk. Your grandfather left behind weighty tomes on scientific fields alongside old classics, and you’d soon learned to drag a chair over and prize some off the shelves, paging through the dictionary when a word didn’t make sense. SAT level words were just another obstacle to counter – a lot easier than clambering up and standing on tip toe to get at the physics textbooks. When you started trying to make friends online, the big words made them laugh or scared them off. So you’d stopped using the longer ones, just like you’d stopped a lot of things. Now you repeat the words to yourself, making a game of decoding the Greek and Latin roots and guessing their meaning before you look. “Demigirl,” you say out loud, pointing to another. “Demi. That means half.”

“Half girl and half dog?” Jake asks, and you giggle.

“John called me a demidog once. Semnipotent demidog.” Thinking back to those first few minutes on the battleship, you feel… nostalgia? You don’t miss what that trip turned into, but maybe you miss the Jade who thought the last of her troubles were behind her, that she’d won the game and made it through and had friends to spend fun, uncomplicated years with.

Things are better now, but uncomplicated? Not a chance.

“Hal was a demi-troll once,” he says carefully. Jake processes new information like that now, cautiously, testing how it fits alongside what’s already in his mind, slotting it in like puzzle pieces. A leftover from thinking he was stupid and gullible, you suspect, although his tortoise over hare approach pays off. Despite your moral disapproval, people are already testing the limits of his powers, making a game of it by feeding him little falsehoods. The moon being made of cheese didn’t get past him. (“It was for science,” Roxy insisted. “If he believed it, would it retroactively happen? What would that do to the space missions? Think of all the new conspiracy websites.” “And the tides,” Dirk had pointed out grimly.) Santa Claus hasn’t flown either. (“One man gallivanting across the globe in a single night? Impossible!”) In these circumstances, caution is a good policy.

“Demigirl…” You roll it around on your tongue. “I kind of like that one. It’s sort of, but not entirely. It’s flexible. Maybe I’ll try it out myself.”

“Do you think John would take it well?”

You snort, remembering attempting to refine John’s concept of “half-gay” a little bit. Dave’s language always gets more opaque when he’s nervous, and John’s polite incomprehension had reduced him to a string of obscure references before the rest of you stepped in to clear things up. Besides bafflement, though, John has taken the news that basically everyone he knows probably fits somewhere on this wiki just fine. (John too, you suspect, considering his staunch disavowal of romance, but you’ll let him come to terms with that himself.) “He didn’t care, once everyone explained the details. He’s just not used to all of the words. And there are a lot of words. Have you found one you like?”

“Not really… It would be easier if someone could reach into my thoughts and just…” He taps his forehead. “Pluck out the right one! But they’re so tangled I can’t expect anyone to do a very good job of that. I can’t sift through this mess.”

You half-close your laptop to show he has your attention. “Do you want me to try?”

“Oh, it’s all a bunch of nonsense. I never know what I really feel, or what I believe.”

“That’s not true.” It would’ve been nice to think that after your last day in the game everyone would have come out perfect, the last flaws hammered out by everything SBURB could throw at you. The reality isn’t that simple. You still work to repair relationships you’ve built on half-truths and pretense. Jake still has episodes of insecurity. All you can do is be patient with yourselves and with each other – and try to bear Roxy’s attempts to numerically pathologize you with good humor.

“Oh, alright. You’ve always been a welcoming ear for my sob stories.” He spreads out his hands in a gesture of defeat. “I wanted… to be one of those manly heroes from my action films, all tough and strong and capable, the ones who can’t fail to save the day. I tried to make that part of who I was. But they seemed too unapproachable sometimes. The closest I’d known to an action hero was you.”

That throws you for a moment, as does every mention of the grandmother he grew up with. It says a lot for your lives that “you” can be a loaded word, with its own history and uncertainties.

Jake trundles on. “Sometimes I felt like I had more in common with the leading ladies. But… not everything, not by a long shot. I wouldn’t say I feel comfortable cast in either role. Maybe that’s where my problems started – trying to work all this out through cinema, but I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.”

“John has that problem sometimes,” you agree. “He doesn’t even have the excuse of learning everything from television.”

“Exactly.” Jake is getting agitated now. “There are all these… expectations. All these rules, how you should act for this or for that. It’s hard to tell if I object to the this or that itself or the rules around it, or if it’s possible to separate them at all. And picking a word, it’s like pinning a bug to a piece of paper! Everyone was always eager to work out who I was, what I was. Whether I liked men or women, and which specimens of each I might be interested in. Not to mention all of them wanting to believe I was whoever they wanted me to be. I don’t know who I want me to be. It’s enough to turn a chap off labels for good.”

You grimace. You had a chat with Dirk and Jane a few days after the game to get the rest of the story and deliver veiled threats as needed. They weren’t needed, mostly. Both seem appropriately remorseful. As far as you know, Jake doesn’t know about the chats, which is for the best. After what he did in the game you have no illusions that he needs your physical protection, but emotional? You’re not waiting for an invitation there. Another you already let him down once by dying and leaving him alone. You won’t let him get lost down this rabbit hole of confusion now. “There are some labels that seem to be about not having labels, but you don’t even have to worry about that if you don’t want to.”

“I do appreciate the ability to be non-committal. But I might not commit on a word, even for that. I’ve had enough soul searching for a while.” He opens your laptop again and taps the x in the corner to close the window. “I’m sorry for dragging you through all this. You were only going to help me make some clothes.”

“I want to help you with whatever you need help with. That’s what families are for. And I thought this was educational. But if we’re getting back on topic…” You reclaim your sketchpad. “Let’s set aside the rules and assume you’re not a boy, or a girl, but a Jake, who can wear whatever he pleases whenever.” You frown and add, “Although hopefully you’re wearing something, at least in public. What do you think about a skirt now? They don’t scratch.”

“People might look at my legs,” he says, crossing them. “They seem to be oddly fascinated by them. Brain Ghost Dirk kept commenting on how smooth mine were right after I ascended. Of course, he was… me? And I don’t mind them being smooth, but I mind people looking. Right now, anyway.”

“You don’t have to show your legs at all,” you say, jiggling your feet under your ankle-length skirt. “With one of these on, people can’t even see their shape. You can wear shorts underneath for added protection, if you want.”

“Proper enough for the fustiest of Victorians. Or… was that a flash of ankle I detected?” He gasps, putting a hand to his mouth and shaking his head at you. “Scandalous! Miss Harley, or Miss Harlot, should I say? You’re a walking temptation. What would your parents say?”

You stick your tongue out at him. “I am probably already a fallen woman, or demigirl, or semnipotent demidog already, what with turning evil and everything. I can show all the ankles I want. It’s too late for me. You do not have to follow my terrible example, unless you want to turn to the side of evil and ankles.”

“Ankles, maybe someday. Evil, I’ve had a close enough brush with for several god-length lifetimes.”

“If you’re still not sure, there are always kilts. Those are appropriately gender neutral, and you can hide weapons under them. Theoretically.” There are strict rules about weapons in the house. Jane’s dad is sensible about these things and strict enough that Jane had to get special permission for chicken Marsala. “Like in Braveheart. You’ve seen that, right?”

“Of course I’ve seen Braveheart. Who do you take me for?”

“Someone with better cinematic taste than everyone stuck watching The Movvvovie.”

“Oh, that isn’t that bad. It’s more of an experience, I’ll admit.”

“Right.” You’ve learned not to question his enthusiastic embrace of all media. After all, you enjoyed Squiddles as a kid, and Dirk’s bro’s films probably aren’t propaganda for the nightmarish gods of the furthest ring. “So, problem solved.”

“Alright,” he decides, and jiggles his knees. “Let’s set my legs free from their long imprisonment. They must breathe, after all. And if I don’t like how this looks, we’ll try something else.”

You grin, balance your sketchbook across both of your laps, and hand him a pencil. “Sure. As many designs as it takes. We’re going to make this perfect.”

He taps the eraser against his chin. “What does perfect mean?”

“Pockets,” you say decisively, and turn to a fresh page.


End file.
